Listening to Capel-le-Ferne

Today I took a team to Capel-le-Ferne to chat about the issues people were concerned about on the doorstep. Folkestone's brilliant Conservative Parliamentary candidate Damian Collins joined me (Damian is left, front in the photo).

It was pretty clear that two issues were high on people's minds - the economic mess the country is in and the weakness of our borders. People were angry that pretty much anyone seems able to wonder in and too little action is taken on human trafficking. The scale of the task at hand is well realised by the voters - if anything, the political class is scrambling to catch up with the new realities of the financial chaos left after years of debt funded spending.

People were telling me with great passion that balancing the budget is essential and that welfare spending in particular was too high. They supported protecting healthcare and want a proper hospital in Dover. Many questioned why their pensions had become worth so little will the public sector seems immune from any pain.

much as i sympathise with people living on private pensions, it must be remembered that people in the public sector would have worked for a lot less money, hence their pension is better.- howard mcsweeney

That used to be the case Howard. And that's also the reason public sector workers got so many honours. But not any more. Public sector pay has been higher than the private sector for some time now. The real difficulty with public sector pensions is that many employees have made contributions out of their pay. So to take away what they will feel they've paid for would cause upset. This is a knotty issue as private sector workers feel their pensions have been taken away and it's unfair that public sector workers seem protected.- Charlie Elphicke